Midnight
by RapiDe
Summary: There are people who have nightmares because of what they've seen and done. Then there are those who live nightmares because of who they are. Read and discover some little about a new addition to the world of RE who lives in both worlds?
1. Chapter 1

Legal disclaimers: I do not own or lay claim to anything directly connected with the "Resident Evil" franchise, nor anything connected to the "Alone In The Dark" franchise. These are both owned by big computer game companies who have well-paid Lawyers. I do, however, own anything original created for the purpose of writing this story.

Disclaimers: Certain people may recognise the character Raven Ferris/Midnight from the "Original Characters" RE Forum. To those who do, this is my attempt to show you just who and what Raven is really all about. To those who don't, I hope that you enjoy my introduction of a new character to the RE world. As for the "Alone In The Dark" angle of this story? Well, everyone has secrets...

**Dark Life**

_Undisclosed location, China, 1996_

"Oops" she said, even as her finger tightened on the trigger. So sad, such a loss to humanity and all that...

She pulled the trigger, point-blank, the gun in the mans face. An explosion of hot steel erupted out of the barrel of the small automatic pistol, tore through the mans face and skull and blasted his teeth out of the back of his head. The man standing on tip-toe at the end of her upturned blade promptly wet and soiled himself, gibbering in fear with his mouth open in such a way she could see as much as hear his teeth chattering.

It was very much official. She was angry, Bad things happened when she was angry. _Very_ bad things.

"Did you know that I liked killing before now? That I'm good at it? It's fun, that's why" she said, without even bothering to turn around and look her next victim in the eyes.

"In fact, that's why I kill so much. With practise, you just get better and better. I suspect that I could be a Serial Killer if I wanted, but why bother? I have a job" she continued, slowly turning the blade of her sword in such a way that the tip sliced an inch-long line into the terrified mans jaw. Blood instantly began to flow, the mans annoying squeaks of fear rising even further in volume and pitch.

In one smooth movement she swung completely around, using her momentum and muscle to aid the edge of the sword, not that she needed it-but she was a professional and practise _did_ make perfect. Besides, the petrified mask of fear the mans face still wore even after her sword cut right through his neck and his head fell slowly and cleanly to the ground, the light of life _still_ in his eyes, made it all worthwhile. For one thing, she'd discovered that it could take up to a minute for a severed head to truly die under the right circumstances...

Even as blood began to gout from the stump of the neck, she snapped a perfect high kick into the chest and catapulted the body into the deep gorge behind it before kicking the head after the body like a football, even as the eyes in the head still moved. They'd both fallen into deep, dead darkness long before she stopped watching.

Her hair shifted about her shoulders even as she just stood there, jet-black dread-locked hair stirring in the slight wind. She turned to her right and looked in the cracked glass of the dead men's battered jeep-courtesy of the Chinese Military, of course-reflecting, even as she did, that the spiralling cracks created by gunfire puncturing the glass in several places left no discernible pattern, but created the begins of several regardless. The appearance, the description suited her perfectly.

Dread-locked jet black hair fell to just above her shoulders in thick braids, well matched to dusky skin with traces of a paler tone around her eyes, collarbone and fingers giving the lie as to her origins. Sharp features and slightly slanted eyes did the rest where drawing the eyes of many were concerned, although wintry blue eyes set amidst such looks drew stares. Hard muscle developed through use not training and a dancers physique, all long, elegant lines with firm curves in the right places, completed her.

Jet-black leggings, boots and a sleeveless shirt covered her somewhat, being made of a strange material that reflected light and repelled punches and kicks in a strange way. On the front of her shirt a Pentagram was seemingly drawn in blood, overlaid by the Star of David. The importance, let alone meaning, of this was not something she discussed.

The silvery blade-its actual composition was considerably more complicated-she carried in her right hand was her Katana, Dragon Lines carved into it in acid. She would never loose it, never could. In her right hand she carried her pistol-which served a purpose, she supposed. Often, though, she _knew_ that such weapons were overrated. She sheathed her Katana in a sheath across her back, left shoulder to right hip, without even having to think about it. It was, literally, an extension of her own body in every way that mattered now.

She turned to her left and stared out at the gorge again, a hole in the otherwise broad and flat landscape of green fields, small clumps of forest and far-away mountains. There was a small valley ten miles to the east, but that had nothing to do with why she was here. Why _they_ were here. Her, Raven Ferris, otherwise and normally just known as "Midnight". Him? Well...

She turned completely around and stared at the big structure there once more. Made of heavily-weathered concrete and stone, with metal roofs sagging inwards around battered walls, small windows with no glass in them but with bars for security and a smashed-open heavy wooden door reinforced with steel backing, the old building was two storeys tall. More importantly, it also had a basement level-the most important part of the structure.

She'd been inside once already. The interior was a mass of rusted metal pipes, big copper tubs, torn-up and long-rotted wiring, steel walkways and concrete floors. Shattered remains of old chimney stacks dominated the centre of the structure, while on the basement level-only reachable via an effectively destroyed elevator shaft with the wrecked elevator itself almost jamming up the only way through-there had been...rooms...with very particular forms of "equipment" in them-and bloodstains around cuffs hanging from walls, ceilings and even dug into the floor. What had been on top of some of the dented old steel tables...

It was sometimes a good thing she never had nightmares-that, according to several Psychologists, she had no Conscience, was a Sociopath, possibly an outright Psychotic, maybe simply "Evil". Otherwise, she would have found the remnants of human's beings bodies left on those tables...disturbing. As it was, she just wanted to track down whoever was responsible for what had happened here and see if she could truly inflict everything that had been inflicted on the dead here on the living before they actually died. Justice had nothing to do with it, the idea simply appealed to the sadist in her-and because it was her job to remove people and things like this from the Earth forever.

It was what had been known, during the Second World War, as an "Experiment Factory" run by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army. They had used live human beings as experiments in...Atrocities...designed to teach them more about the human body and its functions-mainly, how to disrupt and destroy them, for future reference. Thankfully, with the end of WWII before what they had learned could be turned into practice, the abominations that had occurred in this place had passed on into history and later, incredibly, lent a great deal to an understanding of the human body that had allowed the creation of new medicines, forms of surgery and treatments that likely could never even have been imagined before.

That was why people thought that she was evil, not that she cared because they were ultimately right. It was because she knew great evil was always countered by great good, even if nobody could see that at the time. A bit player like her could make no real difference, no matter what she knew and did. She'd made her choices based on the fact that evil meant you could really indulge yourself and every one of your desires. His path...was more complicated.

However, when she'd asked him when he'd last been here since he'd clearly known the location by heart, he'd just replied "1945"-and that had made even her shut up. The arrival of a Chinese army patrol looking for their missing helicopter had been the only reason she'd needed to leave him alone in his search for...whatever he was searching for. Now that she'd dealt with that, it was time to go and see if he'd made any progress yet. She wasn't sure what she thought about what she was doing here yet, let alone why she was here with him, but she'd never been able to turn him down yet...

Maybe that was it? Well...maybe not?

After all, she could smell the sickly-sweet stench of shallow-buried rotting flesh from miles away, taste the thick taint of acid that had been hastily poured over the bodies in an attempt to destroy the evidence just by breathing in. She could still hear the dread in screams and howls of pain, agony and simple loss that haunted the place even half a century later. She could pick out mass burial areas just by glancing around, taking in the oddly shaped mounds in scattered areas near the old building. She could even physically feel the cold, dead and long-lost remnants of the victims forgotten here for so long as whatever was left of them touched her skin and raised fine hairs all over her body.

Maybe she'd been drawn here by another fact entirely, the simple sense of a terrible wrong committed against humanity and the planet that would never end until it was put to rest. It wasn't that she was some dark avenger, no, it was simply that this was what she _did_. Sometimes, certain actions simply had to be answered for...

She strode inside on long legs, almost daring the top brace of the doorway to strike her-even at just 5,8, she was tall for the creators of this place. She stepped carefully across battered floors, moving around holes in the floor, making short jumps to get past jagged-edged metal sections that had fallen in the way at some point, easily settling back to the balls of her feet with flawless landings which evidenced a liquid animal grace.

Casually, she kicked over a rotting old tabletop with such force it snapped in two and felt the crunch of powdered old circuitry beneath her feet as she walked. The table sections flew six feet in both directions easily, before landing with a crash and clatter that seemed to threaten the entire structure of the old building as great clouds of dust spiralled briefly upwards. She almost chuckled, she'd been to places where such clouds being made up of bone dust would have been a blessed relief...

She came to the elevator shaft and paused, eyeing the remnants of the structure with distaste. Halfway down the battered remains of the old shaft the elevator itself still hung, wedged in place somehow so that one corner had dug into the steel frame of the shaft with such force that it had punched right through and dug into stone and concrete, the opposite corner having carved its way into the old steel in such a way the huge tear was still supporting the weight.

It was still relatively stable after fifty years, which was remarkable in itself, but she didn't need a better look to know that weathering and rust were taking their toll harder and harder as time went on. Two people jumping directly on top of it from twenty feet above, the distance from her to it directly now, would have catapulted it clear and finally sealed the entrance to the basement with hundreds of pounds of metal and some forms of plastic-short of explosives, almost suicidally dangerous to try in a place this ancient and decript. Just because a structure still looked solid never, ever meant it was.

In any case, someone had clearly tried something similar a long, long time ago now. The elevator cable and brake were long gone, the elevator roof itself dented and damaged in such a way that it was clear they'd been literally blasted loose by an explosive charge which had been intended to make the elevator a permanent plug against any access to the basement level. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the bomber had been careless and the resulting blast had created such momentum the elevator had spun around on its way down and wedged itself against the walls rather than in the basement doorway. Regardless, she never carried explosives with her. Who needed them?

The old doors leading to the shaft itself had been welded shut, but a couple of good kicks had torn the right-hand one clean out of its runners and left it spiralling clear, all the way down to the elevator, where it had collided metal-one-metal with an echoing scream of tearing steel which had sounded as though the building itself was screaming in pain. She'd taken a moment to enjoy the echoes of torment, then helped him find a suitably heavy and stable piece of battered piping to tie the rope he'd brought with him to so they could go on down. He'd done just that, while she'd first followed then returned upstairs to deal with any unexpected guests just in case-after all, supposedly the Chinese authorities knew nothing about this place. But then, Politics and the Truth were never close Cousins...

Without thinking any more about it, she grabbed the rope and let herself fall down it, before expertly stopping herself six inches above the wrecked elevator itself. He'd used the Escape Hatch on the roof to get in-why the Japanese engineers had built one for a building constructed in 1941 was a question she had no interest in answering-then the rope led back out forced, warped front doors and on down into the darkness.

She let go of the rope, passed through the foot square hatch with her casual impossible agility, landed on hands and feet with her weight so perfectly distributed that the elevator didn't even rock, almost dived forwards to grasp the rope again and went out the doors head-first without slowing down. Six feet down she was back upright, as she hit the bottom of the shaft and the last of the daylight disappeared.

Reaching into a concealed pouch under her uniform at the base of her back, she drew out a ruby-red glow stick and shook it awake. A bloody glow quickly illuminated everything within twenty feet of her. This included the disintegrating skeleton of a man still wearing the shredded remains of a uniform identifying a Colonel of the Japanese army, his legs severed at the knee where the elevator shaft doors had once shut-now, forced open again by leverage and brute strength, they were just an obstruction, as was he.

The remains were contorted backwards, but the mans hands hadn't been reaching for his ruined legs. He'd been reaching back along the corridor, almost been trying to shield his head from something there was no remaining evidence of. By the way his mouth was still held open, by gravity as much as anything else given his state of decay, he'd been screaming when he'd died-and, judging by the scratch marks around his eye sockets, he'd clawed out his own eyes before his death...

She stepped over the remains and headed on to where she knew he'd be. It was a maze of small, interconnected rooms, labs and even small prison cells in the basement levels, but he'd strode on through it all as though he had a map in his head. He'd stopped in front of a heavy steel door with a symbol she didn't know atop it, then told her to keep watch since it would take him a little while to get past the door. She had no doubt he'd have gotten inside by now, he'd proved a real knack at beating mystical wards and just simple locks made by human hands in the two years she'd known him for, on and off.

Various doors had scratches and deep gouges in them that could only have been made by fingernails or claws. Walls had suffered impact damage in the form of craters, long, deep gouges and even slashes so fine and deep no knife or blade with any edge forged by human hands she'd ever seen or heard of could have driven so deep and still come free again. Areas of the walls, floors and ceilings were even discoloured by what could only be explosions of fire erupting at close quarters-yet some of the most obviously fire-damaged areas were the impact craters, as though something wielding fire as a weapon, or on fire itself perhaps, had been fighting in this place? A strange smell was evident, too, the distinctive stink of recent-made ash, the sickening stench of melting stone and burning sulphur. In old times, people would have called this Daemons work...

She finally reached the door and, not at all to her surprise, it was open. She went inside-and got her first look at the inside of the only secured room she'd seen or found in the whole rotting complex. That was her first surprise.

The room was twenty by twenty long and wide, eight feet tall-and constructed entirely of steel with more runes, mystical symbols and forms of arcane protection drawn into and overlapping one another on every surface than she'd have imagined even a madman might attempt. She could make out and understand some of it-which was enough to let her know that at least three different forms of protection had been written into the structure of this place, with a certainty of there being more she couldn't understand. Placed there by the Japanese, during the Second World War, for purposes that had to have died with the people who had once run this place.

All of a sudden she suspected she knew what had happened to the dead officer by the elevator shaft. Something had gone wrong in this room, spread on out into the complex-and he and those down here had killed themselves sealing the room once more to put an end to it. The officer, possibly the only survivor of the initial disaster, had tried to escape upon discovering that sealing the room hadn't shut everything down once and for all-but somebody upstairs had wanted the place shut down and buried forever, somebody who didn't even consider the possibility of survivors. The officer had been too late and, crippled, had blinded himself rather than see what was coming-which led to an explanation for the reason no bodies but those of the long dead had been found down here that she refused to follow through to its logical conclusion. Some things _had_ to be forgotten.

Her second surprise was something she wished she had never had to witness. Mainly because of just what he was doing, kneeling over the only ornament in the room, a three feet wide bronze bowl set atop four lions feet. Three slim lines of bronze led up from it to a centre a foot above the bowls centre, an inch square inverted bell all of the lines led into.

_Edward Carnaby_. Former Private Investigator of any and all Paranormal, related or associated Cases-in the 1920's and 30's. Since then...what he did had become somewhat more interesting, to her at least. For one thing, he was the only man she'd ever met who could not only match but exceed her in terms of kink and pain, areas in which she truly excelled. For another, he was a man of real and true mystery, something which never failed to turn her on-the fact he was truly fabulous in bed was just an added bonus, of course.

His hair was black streaked with traces of grey, even though he was physically only in his mid-thirties. Deep-set dark brown eyes that led straight into Hell cut with a sharp mind and terrible intelligence whenever one just looked at him. An easy six-one tall and big-boned, Carnaby was no weightlifter but carried plenty of muscle and only a little fat on a solid frame. A massive scar that ran from his hairline across his left eye and over the whole left side of his face to his jaw line made his sharp-featured face stand out in any crowd, while his big hands could be seen carrying a gun as often as carrying out any necessary task, with the same level of dextrous skill and physical strength he did everything with apparent.

He'd been wearing battered dark blue jeans, brown climbing boots, a worn light-blue shirt and dark-brown bomber jacket the last time she'd seen him. Now, kneeling in front of the bowl, he was wearing nothing above the waist-and that reminded her that his body was a mass of old, long-healed scars, scars that stood out even in the dim light supplied by her glow stick. He was well tanned, so the lighter patches of scar tissue stood out hard, around the butt of then gun he'd shoved in the back of his trousers...

His hands were clasped around the inverted bell, though, she could see and smell blood leaking from cuts in his palms into the bell. He was repeating some kind of invocation under his breath over and over again, as though to forcibly draw out something hidden inside the bell-then all of a sudden the bell flipped over and the blood gathered inside it fell into the bowl beneath it, gathering in the centre in a pattern nature had nothing to do with. Carnaby didn't so much as try to stand up or back away even as the air shimmered for a moment, then he spoke aloud what seemed like nonsense words and syllables she knew were actually part of an evocation he was performing. That she didn't have any idea what he was doing was only part of the reason she felt so disturbed. She could feel something, right on the very edges of her awareness...

The entire room seemed to shift as her centre of gravity fell away from her and she only stayed upright because she landed on hands and knees. A jet-black cloud full of faces, screaming all, suddenly occupied the entire ceiling area. A head that resembled a dragons with slanted, almost-human eyes, something like a beak for a mouth and what appeared to be feathers for skin appeared in the middle of the smoke and hissed something in Japanese-which she didn't speak-at Carnaby. He replied in the same language, his voice the same deep growl it always was, the same one she always loved and wondered about in equal measure.

Then he lifted a hand to the gleaming stone necklace around his neck that he always wore-why hadn't she thought about that before? Or _seen_ it?-stood up and stepped forwards _into_ the space the head seemed to occupy. It seemed to twitch, jerk-then it span around at terrible speeds so fast that her eyes couldn't follow it even as Carnaby's eyes closed and stayed that way until it finally vanished, with a flicker of dull red flame and a howl she felt more than heard.

She barely noticed that her glow stick had gone out at this, although it did register that she couldn't move under her own strength no matter how hard she tried. She could only just take in the brief, strange shimmer that passed over Carnaby's face and through his eyes even as she felt some impossible lethargy start to drag her down into a slumber she wanted no part of.

"Edward...what...?" she managed, briefly, even as he started to get dressed again and displayed no side effects at all related to whatever it was he had just done. She couldn't even tell if he'd heard her, but he stopped for a moment and turned to look at her, meeting her eyes one last time.

"The Path of Light" he said simply, then he finished getting dressed, turned and walked out as though three words told her everything she needed to know. The last she saw of him was his back as he walked out the door...

/End of Part One. Reviews welcomed/.


	2. Chapter 2

Legal disclaimers: see first part.

Disclaimers: As I stated in the first part of this story, the character of Raven Ferris/ "Midnight" is a character some people who visit the Original Character Forum relating to RE will recognise. I know that the first part of the story had nothing to do with RE, but the character has a very complicated back-story that is best explained in parts. The fact that she knows Edward Carnaby from "Alone In The Dark" is only a small part of that. Rest assured, however, this part will focus on RE-among other things...

**_Dark Life_**

_Unknown location, 1988_

..._Voices_... She could hear voices, but she couldn't see. Why was that? Was she blind? Asleep? No...

...She could feel cold steel against her bare back, legs, arms and backside. Her head seemed...cushioned, by her hair? Yes, that was right, it hadn't been cut in such a long time it had reached her waist in a long, sweaty tendril all tied up in rough knots and tangles...

...She could feel tingles in the extremities of her body, fingers, toes, as though she'd been lying down in one position for a long time and just woken up, as though her blood hadn't been flowing around her body properly. Why weren't her eyes open? Why did her muscles feel like rotten rope? She still didn't know, couldn't seem to tell anything in particular either...

Her eyes suddenly snapped open as her heart abruptly began to accelerate, as though throwing off some kind of lethargy, pins and needles flaring throughout her body before raw, animal strength surged through her muscles. She heard an echoing growl rumble through wherever she was-and a moment later realised that it was coming from her. That felt _good_-but she didn't know why?

She felt a strange, sharp pain in her upper left arm, as though something was stuck in her flesh. She felt strong, tight steel and leather bonds running up and down her body left to right, pinning her at ankles, knees, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders and forehead. Inconveniences, irritations, she needed-no, _wanted_ to move. So she _would_!

Even as she took in the sound of running feet and desperate, shouted words she couldn't yet understand her long body flexed with all of the considerable strength at her disposal, muscles contorting with effort. The bonds securing her arms simply snapped and fell away, her shoulders twisted and with a savage wrench of physical power she almost sat up, the bond on her head taking some hair and skin off but not slowing her down. The bond across her lower chest contorted weirdly, but didn't give way altogether-so she reached down and snapped it in two. Her knees had snapped free, so had her left foot, but she was still caught.

Unthinking instinct made her reach up and rip free the sharp thing in her arm-a Drip, some part of her mind informed her. All of a sudden, as she did so, her vision cleared to needle point-and more. She barely even stopped to take in what she saw, though, as she ripped her still-trapped leg loose and shredded the remaining bonds.

Small room, lots of medical equipment, monitors of all shapes, sizes and descriptions-all attached to her skin by flat steel disks. Room maybe twenty feet long by thirty wide, no windows, only one door, big, solid and steel-correction, _one_ window, an Observation Port directly behind her position in the exact centre of the room. She was sitting up on a steel stretcher, illuminated by lights of the kind which were so bright they left no shadows, highlighting the totally pale white paint colouring everything.

Half a dozen people in the room with her, all of them in full surgical scrubs, dark green, including masks and hair nets-now trying to run for the door in what was clearly outright panic. Her brain finally caught up with what they were shouting, or at least one big one who seemed older than the others was.

"-SEDATION IS NO LONGER EFFECTIVE! CALL SECURITY AND DECLARE A CODE SIX CRASH! AUTHORISED CODE JERICHO ONE!" bellowed the old man, even as he reached the door and rapidly tapped in a Code on the keypad by the door. They couldn't just leave her like _this_-!? What was she _thinking-?!_

All of a sudden her conscious mind seemed to get shoved to one side and something very odd happened to her eyes. What almost seemed like a mist developed, before resolving itself into what she could dimly recognise were the kind of heat signatures animals who couldn't see the way humans could used to hunt and track their prey. Everyone in the room, including her, abruptly lost all humanity even as she felt her teeth slice her lips. These weren't "people", they were _prey_.

In one smooth motion she leapt on top of the stretcher and sprang onto the back of the closest figure, her fangs tearing into the back of its neck. An awful howl of mortal pain echoed before it fell, its head half-severed from behind, even as she ripped free and went for the next.

She used her claws to gut this time, shredding the belly of her prey, long, soft tangles of flesh coming completely clear of the things inside stuck to her claws even as it collapsed without a sound of pain. She had to pause to bite the tangles free because her claws were hopelessly entangled, which gave the prey a second to run on.

Even as a hole opened in the wall in front of her, she tore loose at last and went for the next. She caught its leg as it tried to run and wrenched backwards, the limb snapping in several places and suddenly jetting blood into the air-all over her, which made her lick her lips. The sound this one made defied description as it fell, the tattered remains of its leg still in the room she was in. She considered biting into it and ripping loose some meat-for the moment before the big old man came back through the door and collided with her in mid-air like a flying Elephant.

He was considerably bigger and heavier than she was so she was catapulted from her feet even as she was thrown backwards completely out of her own physical control. Agile as she was, the weight on top of her was too much for her to overcome-and she felt her bones creak as he landed atop her. He grabbed her head with both hands and slammed it into the floor, hard, then again-and again. The sheer force of the blows made her entire head ring, his words forcing their way past whatever had suppressed her human consciousness somehow. She could understand him again.

"_RAVEN_! Remember who you are, soldier! You are not a wild animal, a monster or simply some mad killing machine! You are JERICHO! REMEMBER, damn you, Raven! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!!!" roared the old man in her face. It almost worked-almost.

Her claws suddenly raked his face with such force they scraped bone and just missed his eyes, as a sudden surge of strength from somewhere let her wrench loose of his restraining grip. He roared in pain-and head butted her so hard a sudden flash of white told her he'd almost knocked her out. She used her arms and body for leverage, wrapped her legs around him and rolled them both with all the strength she could strain to gather in-it worked, he swore and unsuccessfully fought to stop her even as they both rolled over to leave her atop him.

Her claws cut deep into his upper chest as she tore away his upper clothing, then she punched downwards once, twice, three times, four-and she was in, as his increasingly desperate strikes at her face and throat fell away to nothing. Her claws tore through skin, muscle and flesh, worked around shattered ribs-and tore out the old mans still-beating heart even as he watched, before she bit deeply into it...

For some reason, her eyesight briefly returned to human norm with this act-and she saw something hanging around the dying old mans throat like a medallion. An eight-sided symbol shaped like an Umbrella, the parts alternately coloured bloody red and white, hanging next to a pure silver cross with what was clearly a representation of a Crucified Christ on it. As a sudden, massive and paralysing electrical shock hit her in the chest, dead centre, ripping reality away from her again for a long time, some part of her understood what that had to mean...

_Racoon City, 1998_

She slowly became aware of herself again as though from a great distance, feeling, inside and out, as though she was not quite connected to her own body. She could glimpse a dark, cloudy sky-darkened by the many fires burning over the awkward rooftops of Racoon City-the slightest hint of silver moonlight trying to cut through them to reach down to the Hell beneath.

She could almost "roll" her perspective and look down onto streets thickly overrun with the staggering remains of the dead-or Undead, depending on which culture one came from, which religion one believed in. She just called them Zombies, herself, because that was what they were. Walking corpses, the dead, with evident fatal wounds on display on and in every body. Some of them were even missing body parts, arms, legs, other bits and pieces, part of a head-one was physically gone below the waist but dragged itself along with its hands and arms alone, once-vital internal organs trailing along behind it like so much meat, the base of its spine evident amidst ruined flesh and muscle.

Some instinct she couldn't identify told her that the three-storey building she was atop, a former small hotel long since made part of the Necropolis Racoon had become, was infested with the Undead. A strange scent suddenly came to her, the sickly-sweet stench of gone-off rotting meat and the awful tang of freshly spilled blood... That fact suddenly reminded her that she was, herself, still alive-but why had this happened? _How_? _What_ had happened to her, another blackout-?! No, that wasn't right...

As if in answer, her view of what was occurring rolled again and she found herself staring at a particular window in the ten-storey office building right next door to the one she was on. The window was shattered and, even at a distance, she could see it had shattered outwards as though-

That had been _her_, she'd done that. It was coming back to her now. Inside the room, even from her limited perspective, she could see signs of a fight. There was blood on the walls and around the shattered window, the furniture in the room was upended and had clearly been thrown around with considerable force-scattered recollections of a vicious fight flickered past her minds eye.

She'd been trying to get to her own apartment in the building when she'd had to break into another to escape attacking Zombies she could no longer dodge, due to sheer weight of numbers. She'd barricaded the door but the Zombies had simply piled against it until it had collapsed in-almost on top of her. She'd fought so hard she'd destroyed the empty apartment-but she'd known it wouldn't be enough, so she'd looked for an exit. She glimpsed herself spotting the far below roof...

Her breath almost caught. That sort of jump was crazy, even for _her_. It had to be almost _forty_ feet at close to a ninety-degree angle, practically a vertical drop...

Suddenly she was looking down at her own inert body on the rooftop, sprawled unconscious at best on a gravel-covered flat area of the otherwise sloping roof. Her aim had been flawless, of course, but had she survived it intact? Even she didn't know, yet. She knew how inhumanly resilient her physical body was, but she had very real limits despite that...

She paused to study herself. Her long, dark hair was spread out around her head and shoulders, scattered around the rooftop beside her head. There were traces of blood in it-but none of it was hers, she could tell. Her eyes were closed but she was breathing slowly and easily, her chest rising and falling with the working of her lungs. Her heart was beating slowly and steadily, she didn't have any significant head trauma beyond evident cuts and bruises that she could see.

The rest of her long, lean body was intact, no broken bones or evident serious injuries. Her pale cream office shirt and black dress were torn and bloodied, her jet-black running shoes covered in nine different kinds of muck-but that was no surprise, given that she'd literally been stuck in them since the Zombies had breached the last line of defence at Umbrella's Racoon headquarters. That had been when the survivors clustered on the rooftop helipad waiting for evacuation had been left to fend for themselves all of a sudden. The nightmare ride through the guts of atrocity the escape from that had been wasn't something she wanted to remember now, if ever. Even she couldn't cope with anything and everything, especially not that kind of "anything", no matter what some people thought of her. She wasn't a Sociopath, she was...well, complicated was _one_ way of putting it.

It occurred to her that, with her body clearly unconscious and possibly comatose, she shouldn't have been able to see or sense _anything_, but for some reason this didn't even give her pause. Why, she didn't know. She felt the urge to let loose with a bitter, twisted attempt at a laugh, but didn't. Hell, with her memory problems, for all she knew she'd been a Psychic in earlier life-and she was only twenty-six years old.

Almost her entire past was more of a mystery to her than anyone else. She had huge gaps of missing time that lasted for hours, days, weeks, months-even years, she'd discovered after Umbrella Psychologists had put her in a deep trance state and asked her questions about herself and her personal past that should have passed by _any_ barriers or blocks her mind had erected, consciously or unconsciously. That should have bypassed even "blocks" put in by _others_, somehow.

_An_ answer would have been a start, she'd discovered later. She'd answered the same way she always did, with fragmentary childhood and teenage memories of her Asylum years, treatments by Doctors whose names and faces she could never see or recall properly. She remembered nothing at all about her family, where she'd been held specifically, what the cause of being held in an Asylum as a child had been in the first. She'd talked about strange things she sometimes half seemed to dream, half seemed to remember, the feel of the wind on her face, wide open grassy plains she had no actual memory of seeing she could run across forever...

One Psychologist had privately confided in her that he thought there might be an extraordinary reason for her apparent partial Amnesia. Which was even more bizarre when her extraordinary resourcefulness, skills and capability to seemingly learn any skill, master in days any task she was set, no matter how insane or impossible, were all taken into account. His theory had, in fact, been so extraordinary that she'd never discussed it with anyone, including him. "Why" was easy-she thought he was right.

His suggestion was that she had been exposed to a very specifically, very specially designed training and skill development program, when she was a child first and again as necessary as she grew up, that had been designed to make her physically and psychologically capable of adapting to anything, anywhere, anyone. The ultimate in "Survivor" training, in a way that suggested she had been bred and raised to survive the Apocalypse if the worst came to the worst.

To prevent her from ever realising the extent of whatever had been done to her mind and body, including the fact that her combat abilities and skills were off of any human chart by at least 100%, she'd been selectively mind wiped and brainwashed, extensively. The aim had been to leave her sane, conscious and capable, but otherwise incapable and unaware of even understanding whatever it truly was she was designed to do. Her body remembered everything in the form of muscle memory, her mind understood it subconsciously, but she had no access to whoever, _whatever_ she truly was. In everyway that mattered, she was a _**weapon**_-and there was no way of telling whether or not she had an "on/off" switch in her head somewhere.

Worst of all was how they'd wiped her memory, his best guess at least. Electroshock charge directly into the brain, specifically targeting memory centres containing the relevant memories by means unknown. The memories were still there, those areas were simply so damaged that she couldn't access them-nor could any form of medical science yet developed that even Umbrella itself had access to.

One thing she _did_ recall was how she'd persuaded the man to keep her secret and what he'd suspected to himself. When they'd finally been finished with one another, a full twenty-four hours later, he'd had to call in sick for a week because he'd been unable to walk on legs left so rubbery after what they'd done together that he'd halfway believed the bones had dissolved in the heat of passion. She'd simply worn a smirk which had threatened to split her face in half, it had been worth it-cold fish, was she...?

She abruptly became aware that there was someone else on the roof with her, pointing a gun at the roof door just ten feet away from them, which was clearly not far from giving way under repeated heavy assaults. Blue tube top, short grey dress, knee-length black boots designed as much for kicking as running. Shoulder-length rich brown hair, eyes of the same colour, smooth, tanned skin, in her early twenties?

_Jill Valentine_.

Even as she remembered the name and the woman, she remembered her own at last, the one thing she could truly call her own-she hoped, at least. _Raven Ferris_, that was who she was.

All of a sudden she was looking up into cloudy sky. It took her a moment too long to realise that she was back in her body and had just opened her eyes...

Y

Jill Valentine knew she was dead, but she also knew that she was going to Hell with at least fifteen more Zombies along to keep her company on the ride. That was, assuming that she could drop a Zombie with every shot, for good, once they came crashing through the door and spilling onto the rooftop. Expert markswoman she might be, Cat's unofficial tutoring had seen to that over more years than she wanted to casually think about, but she was at best going to get one whole clip fired off before she was overrun and eaten alive. Unless she was smart enough to save one bullet for herself...

She'd seen the atrocities and monsters walking the halls of the Spencer Mansion, watched her friends literally be eaten alive and come back to kill her with empty eyes and silent hearts with their own blood still dripping from any number of fatal injuries, dead flesh rotting even as they moved. She'd seen every bit of the madness the Umbrella Corporation was capable of unleashing as Mutant versions of plants, animals and even people moved around the mansion and did...things...a sane humans eyes should never see. She'd seen what had become of George Trevor's daughter after thirty years of experimentation and needed no feat of the imagination to imagine what had to have happened to his Wife.

She'd read through physical proof that the Umbrella Corporation had not only known about all of these things long beforehand, but had encouraged them-and even gone so far as to expose their own research team at the Mansion to see what happened in an uncontrolled release of the Virus. She'd read about a secret Umbrella lab called "The Hive" where the Outbreak had actually originated-only to loose all of the proof she'd been able to gather in the last panicked, savage battle for survival as she and the surviving S.T.A.R.S. had gone toe-to-toe with the ultimate monstrosity created by Umbrellas work: the Tyrant. An eight foot tall killing machine with its heart on the outside, a left hand replaced by massive claws that could cut through steel, all powered by enough muscle to throw small cars at them if it wanted to. Or a medium-sized car, Jill suspected. She wasn't sure she'd have rated a tank against the Tyrant in a close fight.

Then, after they'd survived that and told the truth? Ridicule, humiliation, personal and professional disgrace-and, to all intents and purposes, she'd been fired by S.T.A.R.S. on the grounds of extreme incompetence and serious questions about her mental health. Of all of it, that last had hurt the most. They'd known that Umbrella would throw everything at them after they came clean and gone on with their eyes open. But S.T.A.R.S…if there was one place, one _person_ she'd always no-questions-asked given her total loyalty to, bar her father, it was the organisation she'd planned to devote the rest of her life too.

Only now that it had become clear they didn't care at all if someone had to be the sacrificial lamb to clean up a "mess"...? She was glad she'd submitted her Resignation before the official Dismissal notice had reached her through the post. She'd been so utterly disgusted by the S.T.A.R.S. organisations clear participation in the on-going Cover-Up she'd lost all faith in them despite Barry's objections, long before he'd realised why. She'd Quit without his even knowing about it until afterwards.

Barry had pointed out that Umbrella more than likely had ways to apply significant political pressure to the S.T.A.R.S. organisation if they wanted to. On top of which they all knew now that there had to be Umbrella Sleeper Agents feeding misinformation to the whole from the inside, more than likely meaning that the honest Agents-almost certainly the vast majority-simply didn't know what was really going on. He'd made some good points, but it had all been too late. She was done with this side of the law, she was going to do what she had to do to fight the good fight from the outside from now on.

That was what had led her to establish the roughly fortified school as a Safe House early on, when the Outbreaks had begun slipping out of Police control and media outlets all over the city had gotten so panicked they'd actually printed pictures of "live" Zombies alongside headlines such as "_**The Dead Walk!!!!**_" Of course, the moment the Outbreak had reached the city it had been too late to stop it. Even Evacuation would only have risked spreading the Virus, so she'd stayed behind with the civilians to try and help when Umbrella had built a wall to prevent the entire population from even trying to escape.

A hundred thousand people were going to die and worse, Umbrella Corp. knew it and weren't going to do anything about it except study the situation to gain all of the data they could of use. If she'd been any more angry about all of it she'd have simply suffered a Psychotic Break as the heat of her fury grew almost beyond her minds ability to even comprehend, let alone control. But that was what had left her helpless and waiting for death atop the building as Zombies smashed their way through the only realistic escape route, her increasingly desperate search for survivors having left her nowhere to run from the heaving hordes blocking the street below in both directions even as the infested building vomited up its walking disease to slaughter her.

Well, no question, she'd go down fighting. It was just a shame she'd only have a Corpse for company, to witness her last stand. She'd seen the other woman's final fall and awfully heavy landing, she knew with certainty that nobody could survive such a long fall directly onto concrete, let alone get up and do anything even if by some miracle they _did_ survive.

That was why her heart stopped, for a long, long second, when the "dead" woman's eyes opened. A moment later, she sat up and shook her head, as though clearing out the cobwebs...

Y

Raven sat up more smoothly than she would have imagined possible after the beating she'd already taken, protesting strained muscles and creaking joints still responding instantly to her minds command. She rose to her feet quickly, not even staggering once-and it occurred to her that she should have been in far more pain than she was, for all of her bodies resilience, the kind of pain that left one screaming on the floor as screams of pain echoed out across the city. She didn't even seem particularly uncomfortable and, for the life of her, she couldn't understand why.

It was almost as though there was a break in her Nervous System between her pain receptors and her brain. In fact, it was almost as though this was the way she responded to great pain, by sealing it so far away from her consciousness that it had no impact in reality on her ability to function, at all. But she'd picked up plenty about the human body and how it worked from Umbrella Scientists since she'd begun working for Umbrella in '96, plenty more about the mind as well. Even a Psychotics mind didn't function like that, deranged with rage and the demented need to commit physical violence on a level which would literally kill them if not stopped or even worse. The mind had to be "trained" to ignore or override signals of that nature-and, at her best guess, hers had received much more than a "basic" form of that. Not that she wasn't injured, of course...

Her mind finally caught up with what was going on even as she registered the look Jill Valentine was shooting at her-half shocked, half appalled-even as the door to the roof finally snapped open as the lock gave and three Zombies fell out on top of each other. Two more tried to force their way out of the small doorway and over their fallen fellow creatures even as the first three hit the floor-Jill Valentines pistol spoke once and the left hand Zombie was catapulted backwards with a neat hole between the eyes. She aimed at the second standing Zombie-only Raven beat her there.

Charging Zombies as though she did it every day was not something which struck Raven Ferris as a good idea, but some instinct told her it was the right thing to do. She got to within arms reach of the standing Zombie and, before it could even snap at her, grabbed it around the throat with both hands, lifted it off of the floor and slammed its skull into the top of the doorframe with such force the bone splintered and was driven deep into the brain.

Knowing it was dead even before she threw it away over her shoulder like a rag doll, she drove her right foot down like a hammer from Hell and snapped a second Zombies spine with such force that her boot penetrated its chest cavity entirely and slammed into the ground beneath. Ripping her foot loose trailing shreds of flesh and smeared in thick, dried dark blood, she finished the job with the same foot by kicking the Zombie in the back of the head as hard as she could. The top half of its head almost came completely free of the lower half even as the contents of the shattered skull exploded out of the Zombies eyes, nose and mouth.

Reaching down, she picked up the third Zombie and threw it at Jill before grabbing the fourth and simply hurling it down the stairwell with an awful clatter of bending and buckling steel, snapping bones and tearing flesh. A single shot behind her told her that Jill had done her job-and why did she find it so natural to do all of these things? How did she just _know_ how to take down Zombies, for pities sake?

She turned around to face Jill, sure that they were clear at least for the moment-and, not at all to her surprise, found herself staring down the barrel of Jill's pistol. If she'd just seen someone kill three Zombies with their bare hands in thirty seconds she'd have been a bit more than just nervous, too.

"You and I need to talk, woman" said Jill, slowly and carefully pronouncing each word as though she was afraid she'd be misunderstood. Well, caution was a given what had just happened?

"Alright, I'll start. My name is Raven Ferris and-what-?!" Raven began, even as Jill's eyes shot wide open in shock. She span-and came face to face with an almost dog-shaped skinless blood red creature, with huge teeth and claws clearly designed to rend and tear. Worst of all, it had a long tongue which could punch right through concrete and tear anything softer to pieces.

_Licker_.

It had to have crawled up the outside of the building, drawn by the gunfire to look for fresh meat in the increasing dusk. It had caught them both cold because she'd been concentrating on the only human being she'd seen in over a week.

Even as it leapt at her, claws flashing in the dimming sunlight, its long tongue licked out-and nearly tore her throat open as she failed to duck in time. The impact span her around, which let one of its claws bite deep into her side. She knew she was infected even before she began to collapse.

She had to wonder if she really was going to die, here, now, with so many questions left unanswered, with so much left undone. She _couldn't_ die like this...

Could she?

_**The End?**_

/All Reviews and/or comments welcomed/.

IS she or ISN'T she? All I'll say is this is the End of _this_ story...


End file.
